Silent voices, untold stories: perceptions of female students towards their own experiences and higher educational opportunities in Peshawar, Khyber Pukhtunkhwah (KP) (Pakistan)

The aim of this thesis is to investigate factors relating to the low level of women’s participation in higher education in Khyber Pukhtunkhwah (KP) a particularly conservative and traditionalist region of Pakistan, adjoining Afghanistan. The province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwah has a culture, language, traditions and patriarchal values that are substantially different from the rest of the country. There is a chronically low participation rate in higher education by women (6.55%) as opposed to men (28.44%). For this research, a mixed methods approach was used founded on Marxist and Islamic Feminist research paradigms, interviewing and questioning students in four higher education institutes in Peshawar, KP, using a research design that included both quantitative and qualitative methods. The data analysis reveals that the women who succeed in entering higher education actually have social / economic advantages; they are in general from the elite and the upper middle classes. However, even they face problems relating to the particularly conservative understandings and practices of Islam that are culturally specific to KP/ Pukhtun culture as these were dominant in forming their decisions rather than the actual teachings of Islam. Attitudes towards women’s work and the language of instruction used in their education had implications for their educational opportunities Women of all economic classes had difficulty with being allowed to reach decisions on their own: they had to seek approval from their families, particularly from their male relatives. Men (and women) misinterpreted the teachings of religion, in other words they ‘culturalised’ Islam instead of Islamising the culture. One of the aims of this thesis is ‘Breaking the Silence: Listening to Pukhtun Women’. This thesis does this as it gives voice to (a number of) Pukhtun women, concerning their lives, hopes, anticipations, relating to education and career. However, this is just a beginning and much more research needs to occur in order to allow better understanding of the lives and aspirations of women in this area of Pakistan

Modeling Probability of Path Loss for DSDV, OLSR and DYMO above 802.11 and 802.11p

This paper presents path loss model along with framework for probability distribution function for VANETs. Furthermore, we simulate three routing protocols Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) in NS-2 to evaluate and compare their performance using two Mac-layer Protocols 802.11 and 802.11p. A novel approach of this work is modifications in existing parameters to achieve high efficiency. After extensive simulations, we observe that DSDV out performs with 802.11p while DYMO gives best performance with 802.11.Comment: IEEE 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc

ApplianceNet: a neural network based framework to recognize daily life activities and behavior in smart home using smart plugs

A smart plug can transform the typical electrical appliance into a smart multi-functional device, which can communicate over the Internet. It has the ability to report the energy consumption pattern of the attached appliance which offer the further analysis. Inside the home, smart plugs can be utilized to recognize daily life activities and behavior. These are the key elements to provide human-centered applications including healthcare services, power consumption footprints, and household appliance identification. In this research, we propose a novel framework ApplianceNet that is based on energy consumption patterns of home appliances attached to smart plugs. Our framework can process the collected univariate time-series data intelligently and classifies them using a multi-layer, feed-forward neural network. The performance of this approach is evaluated on publicly available real homes collected dataset. The experimental results have shown the ApplianceNet as an effective and practical solution for recognizing daily life activities and behavior. We measure the performance in terms of precision, recall, and F1-score, and the obtained score is 87%, 88%, 88%, respectively, which is 11% higher than the existing method in terms of F1-score. Furthermore, our scheme is simple and easy to adopt in the existing home infrastructure

Increasing smoking intensity is associated with increased disease activity in axial spondyloarthritis.

A history of ever-smoking appears to be associated with a more severe disease phenotype in axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). However, evidence is sparse for the effect of increased smoking exposure on disease outcomes or whether smoking reduction or cessation improves outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore whether a dose-response relationship exists between pack-years and disease activity and functional impairment in axSpA. Consecutive patients meeting ASAS criteria for axial SpA were recruited from a spondyloarthritis service. The associations between pack-years of smoking and: (1) disease activity (BASDAI/ASDAS), (2) spinal pain, (3) functional impairment (BASFI) and (4) inflammatory markers were explored using multivariable linear models, adjusted for age, gender and use of TNF inhibition (TNFi) therapy. Pack-years were categorised into four groups (40) and analysed with light smoking (40, β = 2.6 (0.54, 3.56)), higher BASFI (21-40, β = 2.1 (0.42, 4.80); >40, β = 3.2 (0.76, 5.71)), and higher ASDAS (21-40, β = 0.82 (0.14, 1.51)). This cross-sectional study demonstrated that smoking is associated with increased axSpA severity markers in a dose-response manner. Particular effort should be made to restrict smoking exposure early before accruing a significant number of pack-years

CatSper ion channels: Bioinformatics analysis in Homo sapiens

Due to the availability of huge amount of molecular biology data, our main focus was to determine the protein structures, functions and their role in different molecular pathways. The 3-D structure prediction of protein is important in medicine and biotechnology. Molecular docking not only finds the interaction between proteins but also the accurate models of energy of these interacting proteins and helps in further designing of the better drug for that particular protein. The drug targeting is either to inhibit, restore or for the modification of the protein structure. CatSper protein family is calcium ion permeable channels, located in the plasma membrane of sperm tail. It contains a conserved domain of six transmembrane helices in their protein sequence. These four CatSper proteins (1 to 4) assemble and form tetramer, calcium selective channel. It has been found that all members of CatSper protein family (1-4) have a role in hyperactivation in sperm and fertilization processes. As a result of deletion of certain regions (bps) containing these genes along with some other genes, male infertility occurs. We have predicted and analyzed the 3D structures of all members of CatSper protein family in this article. Docking of predicted 3D structures of CatSper protein family, with calcium ion was also performed to verify their interactions.Key words: CatSper, bioinformatics analysis, infertility, cation channel